Consultancy and research

Giving value to your business: hints and tips from Elizabeth Townsend

Elizabeth Townsend has been leading online advertising operations since 1999, first as a Ad Operations Executive at Yahoo! and now as a Head of Online Advertising Production at Financial Times where she manages the global online ads production team for the FT website. Elizabeth sits on our Academy Steering Board and we asked her for a few extra hints and tips to share for how to run ad operations.

Here are some ideas on the most important way Ad Operations teams can give value to their business:

· Consider yourselves an part of the wider sales department. Without Sales, Adops can't function, without Adops, Sales can't function. Both teams are of equal importance. This reduces the "them and us" which can develop between sales and adops.

· Be commercially aware. Every booking that goes through your hands represents significant value to the sales person, agency, advertiser and business as a whole. Adops do have an influence over hitting the revenue targets, sales can sell the booking but adops deliver the booking.

· Be honest. If you make a mistake scheduling a campaign (and you will!) hold your hands up and say I made a mistake. Every one makes mistakes, it's human, we learn from them, put new processes in place to try and prevent the same error from occurring again. However if you make an excuse, Agencies will be irritated and see through it, if you are honest the wind is taken out of angry sales immediately. Honesty really is the best policy.